Monday, December 31, 2007

An Illusive Reality-Background

This is a short painted book I produced while in my second semester at The School Of Visual Arts, NYC, in the Spring of 1990. I was taking a class entitled 'Words And Pictures' where the aim at the end of the semester was to produce a tangible document of some kind, preferably a number of pages long. With the help of my friend Marcos Levy (who also served as the model for the story's protagonist), this was my contribution. Marcos wrote the initial draft, upon which I reworked. Going back to this story, in 2006 and 2007, I decided to rework some of it again. The ideas are the same, it's just the way they're told thats changed.

I've also done a fair amount of tweaking and cleaning up of the original art in Photoshop. The originals were all done on 15 X 20 Brainbridge Illustration board and used a variety of media including pencils, inks, oils, pastels, photos and glued down objects. Over the years, the originals had gotten dirty and lost some paint. With Photoshop I was able to fix some of that, rework some images and add some effects here and there as well as redo most of the type. But for the most part it's very close to the original way it was presented.

The books were made with color xeroxes (mounted onto thick drawing paper), which at the time were fairly expensive, though I found a place in soho that was able to do them for around a couple of bucks each. Of course, the originals were too big for one pass, so they had to be done copied one side at a time, then later the two halves were lined up and glued together. Ah, the good old days!

1 comment:

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